Product Description

'So I was the 6787th person in Beijing wanting to act in the film and TV industry. There were 6786 young and beautiful, or ugly and old people before me trying to get a role. I felt the competition, but compared with 1.6 billion people in China, 6786 was only the population of my village. I felt an urge to conquer this new village.' Life as a film extra in Beijing might seem hard, but Fenfang - the spirited heroine of Xiaolu Guo's new novel - won't be defeated. She has travelled 1800 miles to seek her fortune in the city, and has no desire to return to the never-ending sweet potato fields back home. Determined to live a modern life, Fenfang works as a cleaner in the Young Pioneer's movie theatre, falls in love with unsuitable men and keeps her kitchen cupboard stocked with UFO instant noodles. As Fenfang might say, Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, isn't it about time I got my lucky break?

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36786 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review
`Breezy and brazen novel that guarantees pleasure with every pop'
--The Independent

Sunday Herald
`[a] graceful, subtle novel ... a piece of art that portrays human determination through evocative photos and simple narration.'

Irish Times
`her atmospheric, unusually physical narratives are alive and attractively insistent, inspired variations on the theme of quest...'

Customer Reviews

Hungry for life in the big smoke
Vignettes from the coming of age of a Chinese teenager who runs away to Beijing where she becomes extra 6787 in the movies. She finds that life in the big smoke can be just as lonely as at home where at least you have your parents and the farm. Fenfang is always hungry and true to her age forgets to eat and then binges. She seems to only have two friends since she left her jealous boyfriend, and tries to sleep a lot - like teenagers and students the world over!

This could have been set equally as well in America, but for the references to the China and its regime. The author's note at the back explains how she wrote the book ten years ago, and when she came to review/translate for the new edition, she no longer agreed with some of Fenfang's thoughts, so she revised parts. As a novel about youth by a then younger writer, maybe it would have been more interesting to leave them intact...?

Made in China
I could mention numbers. Everyone always mentions numbers when it comes to China. They're so overwhelmingly impressive.

Mark Leonard reports (Prospect, March 2008) that the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing has 50 research centres covering 260 disciplines with 4,000 full-time researchers. Whereas Britain's entire think tank community is numbered in the hundreds. Yet, he asks, how many of us can name a contemporary Chinese writer or thinker?

Well, here's your chance.

The numbers in this particular case, however, spell trouble. Big trouble. This book is only 126 pages long. You'll finish it, and you'll want more. Much more.

You could, of course, read it twice. And if you've never done that before, let me explain why you'll probably want to do so now.

If you're anything like me, the films you watch again and again are those that somehow achieve the impossible: a conviction that you're really watching a slice of someone else's life, yet at the same time clocking the man-made construction that has gone into the whole damn thing. It's seeing art being created, and believing the result.

In her book "20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth" Xiaolu Guo delivers a written equal of this cinematic act over and over: the narrative injecting you right into the workaday, bulldozed, breathless, crumbling, reconstructed, jagged, messy, fascinating and bountifully beautiful detail that is the rubble out of which a new Beijing is being born. The "ravenous youth", Fenfang, becomes your own eyes and ears, through which you soon realise you'll never, ever, get to see this again. Because this is not just Beijing, this is us, as we move into life. This is us as we grow up.

Yet at the same time, this is clearly a very selective and edited intimacy - fragments of [her] life in that city - reminding us that this is, in fact, a construction, a story being told. But her lovers, apartments and jobs will appear to you as real as violence, cockroaches and luck.

The real poignancy, though, is in the effect all this has on Fenfang when she leaves any of these things behind. Or when they leave her behind. Just like the entire districts of Beijing that are disappearing from her horizon every day as the city re-builds itself to another design.

It's the gaps in between people - be they empty lovers' beds or the bulldozed areas of a city - it is what happens in those seemingly mute landscapes - that provide the focal points, the anchors, the revolving doors through and by which fate is condensed, weighted and spun out again.

The most vulnerable relationships, buildings and neighbourhoods are collapsing all round. Slowly, surely, something better takes their place. These are the metaphors chosen for lives in modern-day China.

This is no coincidence. Just look at Jia Zhang-ke's astonishing film "Still Life" (San Xia Hao Ren, winner Venice Golden Lion 2006). Buildings and lives are being knocked down left, right and centre as the Three Gorges Dam takes shape. But there, in between the shells of empty buildings, human hearts go on beating. Human brains go on hatching ideas. Huge personal dramas unfold at the same speed with which concrete is being pulverized.

"Things are changing so fast, I had to change the pace of my filmmaking to keep up," says Jia Zhang-ke.

"Everything around me was changing so fast - my apartment block, the local shops, the alleys, the roads, the subway lines. Beijing was moving forwards like an express train, but my life was going nowhere....I had to do something....so I could match this fast-moving city," says Fenfang.

She may have been a girl from peasant stock, brought up in "a nothing place that won't be found on any map of China". But in these twenty fragments of Fenfang's life after she `escapes' to Beijing, the skill of her humour, the tales of her loves and particularly her losses combine as gleaming coordinates to fix her new position clearly. As she tears up her own foundations, the new building of her career as a scriptwriter starts to arise.

And if Fenfang mutters that her work will never match the talents of China's `Fifth Generation' of film directors, then Xiaolu Guo need have no such fears: this is writing that easily reaches the humanity, the humour and the hope of the likes of Zhang Yimou, or his brilliant Taiwanese contemporaries Hou Hsiao Hsien and Edward Yang.

Oh, Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, this is your golden opportunity to see what's being made in China. So buy the book. Read it. Twice.

This is them as they grow up.

Delightful Fragments
I absolutely loved `A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers' by Xiaolu Guo and so when `20 Fragments of Ravenous Youth' arrived it went straight up to the top of my TBR. I was hoping that I would find the writing both touching and comical and that the protagonist would be again someone I enjoyed following the journey of and Guo delivered one hundred per cent.

'So I was the 6787th person in Beijing wanting to act in the film and TV industry. There were 6786 young and beautiful, or ugly and old people before me trying to get a role. I felt the competition, but compared with 1.6 billion people in China, 6786 was only the population of my village. I felt an urge to conquer this new village.' So Fenfang introduces us to her life in Beijing as a young woman searching for work, love and herself at the same time.

We follow her as she moves from place to place, man to man and random job to random job. I loved the descriptions of the parts she played such as `woman waiting on a bridge' or `woman who says nothing in a café'. This is where I think Guo is just superb in writing her characters, in very few words she can conjure up a people by what they say, for example `oh heavenly bastard in the sky' being on of the most common thing to come from the mouth of Fenfang. It conjures up a character very quickly that tries hard but is very much aware of how hard life can be.

Indeed Beijing life is what this book is mostly about though featuring the TV world that Guo has so much experience in. Reading the afterword I found out this was actually the first book Guo wrote, she has now gone back and rewritten it as it was ten years ago and she didn't agree with everything the original heroine was saying. For a debut novel, even if reworked some what, it is a great set of twenty snap shots of a young life in Beijing dealing with the hardships as well as the great sides. I loved the fact Fenfang particularly loved living in the area full of pirate DVD's and books regardless of all the cockroaches, the pro's outweighing the cons. One scene involving Fenfang swallowing a cockroach and her doctor being completely unsympathetic and saying she wouldn't die made me feel slightly ill and laugh in abundance at once.

All the other characters are very secondary in the novel, no one else features heavily and you don't find out masses about the people she interacts with just short concise paragraphs that tell you all you need to know. For example, one of her boyfriends who shares a room with his whole family... and a dog that uses their bed as a toilet. Can you imagine sharing a room with your partner's whole family? The book is as it says simply 20 fragments of Fenfang's life in Beijing and its cultures. I found it fascinating, funny and in places unsettling. I think Guo is undoubtedly one of the best new writers around and everyone should give this ago, just don't expect `a concise history' part two, I think that's why people have said its not as good, I think it's a sign Guo isn't a one trick pony.